AXSChat Interview with Rick Williams - CEO of Freeney Williams.

02/15/20 • 27 min

Hosts. Antonio Santos, Neil Milliken and Debra Ruh
Rick Williams is the CEO of Freeney Williams Ltd, one of Europe’s leading specialist disability consultancies which provides strategic advice and guidance on employing disabled people and ensuring their access to goods and services. He has a strong and proven combination of skills, knowledge, experience and qualifications. He is a Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, an Associate of both the Business Disability International and the Business Disability Forum as well as being a non-executive Director of Ofcom. Before setting up the company in 2002 Rick spent over 30 years in the Public Sector working in a range of high profile posts in HR and senior management. He is a highly effective consultant who has worked in many high profile organisations both in Europe and the UK.
Some of the UK organisations for which Rick has worked include the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Department of Work and Pensions, JobCentre Plus, KPMG, PWC, Virgin Media, BT, Centrica, Accor Hotels, Barclays and the Houses of Parliament.
His international work has included working with the ILO in Geneva and Turin, acting as a special adviser to the Bermudan Government and advising NGOs in Moscow and Vienna.
Rick is blind and the combination of being a disabled person and experienced as a consultant, HR professional and senior manager, gives him a high level of expertise in organisational policies and attitudes towards disabled people and how they can be shaped.
For further information about Freeney Williams Ltd go to http://www.freeneywilliams.com

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AXSChat Podcast with Sarah Lewthwaite & Angharad Butler-Rees from University of Southampton

Sarah Lewthwaite (PhD, FRSA) is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southampton’s Centre for Research in Inclusion where she leads a major new UK Research and Innovation study ‘Teaching Accessibility’ as Future Leaders Fellow and Principal Investigator. Sarah and her team are researching the teaching and learning of digital accessibility in universities and the workplace, to build an evidence-based understanding of how accessibility can be taught more effectively. The 4-year study received over £650,000 from UKRI, and seeks to forge new collaborations and dialogue between universities and industry. Sarah has a background in inclusive education, a PhD in disability and social media, and 15 years of research experience spanning HCI, accessibility, education and disability studies.
Angharad Butler-Rees is a Senior Research Assistant at the University of Southampton and is a co-investigator on the ‘Teaching Accessibility’ study. Angharad has a longstanding interest in disability issues, having worked for Leonard Cheshire Disability and UCAN Productions ( a creative arts co-operative for blind and partially sighted young people). Angharad’s interest in digital accessibility has been driven in part by her personal experiences of encountering barriers to technology as someone with a visual impairment, and further fuelled through her previous research in developing accessible Apps for blind and visually impaired people.

Angharad is also in the final stages of completing her PhD, which explores the lives of individuals involved in disability activism at a time of austerity.

by Antonio Vieira Santos

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AXSChat Podcast with Al Etmanski - author of The Power of Disability: 10 Lessons for Surviving, Thriving and Changing the World

AXSChat is hosted by Antonio Santos, Neil Milliken and Debra Ruh.
Al Etmanski is an author, community organizer, social entrepreneur, and parent activist in the disability world. He is an Ashoka fellow which is a global network of social entrepreneurs and a member of John McKnight’s Asset Based Community Development Institute (ABCD). He conceived and lobbied into existence the world’s first savings plan for people with disabilities, the Registered Disability Savings Plan. Collective RDSP deposits total more than $4 billion benefitting close to 200,000 disabled Canadians.

He is the best selling author of three books. His fourth book The Power of Disability: 10 Lessons for Surviving, Thriving and Changing the World has just been published.

Al believes that extraordinary acts are not reserved for the special few. And that the vast majority of people are making the world a better place, even though their contributions are ignored, dismissed or forgotten. He wrote his new book to awaken the world to the collective and powerful achievements of people with disabilities. He is optimistic about what we can do when everyone’s gifts and talents are welcomed and enabled. Al blogs at aletmanski.com

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